1. Technical Field
This disclosure relates generally to a method and system for managing interactive communication campaigns.
2. Description of the Related Art
It is known to provide systems or hosted solutions through which a business entity can create and manage an “outbound” communications campaign. An example of an interactive communications campaign is a telephone campaign to determine whether a target person desires to take a given action, or to remind that person about some event. Such outbound campaigns may also offer the person an opportunity to be connected to a customer representative. One such system may be an outbound telemarketing service. In this example, a business entity accesses the service through a web-based portal and provisions an outbound calling campaign. The targets are identified and managed by a campaign and list management (CLM) process, which typically uses historical connect patterns or demographic modeling to determine when a connect to a given target is most likely to be completed successfully. The output of the CLM process is a set of targets (or their respective phone numbers) ordered in a best time-to-call sequence. At a designated time, the service provider initiates the campaign, e.g., by providing the contacts to a set of telephone servers that set-up and manage the telephone calls to the targets of the campaign. During a given outbound call, as noted, a recipient may be afforded an option to connect to a contact center, e.g., to speak to a customer representative. In such implementations, the hosted solution typically is integrated directly with the contact center's on-premises automatic call distributor (ACD).
Workforce management systems are well-known in the prior art. Such systems integrate many management functions, such as workforce forecasting and scheduling, skill planning and scheduling, multimedia contact management, real-time schedule adherence, and the like. A representative commercial system of this type is TotalView®, from IEX Corporation. Such systems generate forecasts of call received volumes and call handling times based on historical data to determine how much staff will be needed at different times of the day and week; they then create schedules that match the staffing to the anticipated needs.
While known CLM and WFM systems are useful for their intended purposes, these functions have been independent. Moreover, CLM systems have several problems, foremost in that historical connect patterns are derived from data evidencing when agents have been scheduled in the past rather than data concerning when agents should be scheduled in the future. Moreover, CLM models do not consider skills-based agent availability, and they do not have the capability of optimizing the contact list as staffing changes occur, as they do inevitably.